Photo by: Chris Remick
Defense Marks Up Road To Conference Title Defense
April 27, 2024 | Lacrosse, #ForBoston Files
Notre Dame and its 17 goals per game average didn't stand a chance against the maroon wall.
Acacia Walker-Weinstein didn't sleep much ahead of Friday night's matchup between third-seeded Boston College and the second-seeded Notre Dame. She wouldn't have rested much anyways with the quick turnaround associated with the Atlantic Coast Conference's women's lacrosse tournament, but her team's offensive eruption to delete Duke from the bracket reinforced what she understood about the upcoming matchup against the Fighting Irish.
Notre Dame possessed one of the few attacks capable of playing head-to-head with BC, and Walker-Weinstein watched the Fighting Irish finish one goal better than her Eagles during their mid-March matchup at Alumni Stadium. The road to the ACC championship game destined to pit BC against either Notre Dame or Syracuse in some capacity, but the fifth overall game against the Fighting Irish over the past two seasons forced her to reassess how to stop the emergent, multi-faceted opponent.
She watched film and reasoned against overanalyzing what she saw, but as the coaches caffeinated their minds into the deep Charlotte night, the light bulb within a mind that clinched both conference and national glory opted for the most straightforward approach. BC, she believed, had the defensive talent to stop Notre Dame, so she manned up the team and instructed them to guard the Fighting Irish with a straightaway, one-on-one alignment.Â
Notre Dame's attack was the sum of its parts, so BC dedicated itself to dismantling each individual piece with a methodical and systematic counterattack. At its best, the unrelenting approach prevented the mighty Fighting Irish from mustering any type of traction, and the Eagles charged their way into the conference championship game with a complete, 9-7 win.
"I think that regardless of the score, the defense has one goal," said goaltender Shea Dolce. "It's always been about giving the offense the ball. We take everything one possession at a time, and we're not really [thinking about] if we have a lead or if it's tied [because] we were really just trying to do our job. [On Friday night], we were just locked in."
Using the one-on-one defense carried inherent risk against Notre Dame because of the Fighting Irish's overall strength in generating its goal-scoring ability. The team that entered Friday night just short of 18 goals per game didn't have a single player in the top-50 of individual scoring in the nation, a fact that stamped home the six different players with 20-plus goals on the season. Five of those players each generated 15-plus assists with the large bulk at or near 20 helpers, but even the more pure numbers of players like Jackie Wolak and Madison Ahearn had a full cloud of other options with teammates like Mary Kelly Doherty and Abby Maichin scoring 20 goals with a 50 percent success rate on their shooting numbers.
The numbers stood in stark contrast to the Duke attack with two 20-goal scorers and four players in double figures. Where Wednesday focused on neutralizing the Blue Devils with a zone-based approach that took the key scorers out of their element, Notre Dame easily sought to metamorphosize into a different team when the first options weren't available in the first half.
"The biggest thing in those moments is what we talked about in the huddle," said senior Sydney Scales. "It's about having a single person communicate about what's controllable. Especially at the end of a game, where you're tired, you have to focus on [communicating] because it connects each of us on the field. We have to make sure we're playing well when we want to be one-on-one. Every time we played well, we were holding the other team, so we needed to keep doing that, regardless of when we were tired or a little bit fatigued [as the game wore on]."
The end result prevented Notre Dame from ever gaining more than its initial 1-0 lead. Ahearn's goal in the first five minutes of the first quarter was her only tally until nine minutes remained in the game, and the ensuing switch to secondary options failed to generate more than the late quarter goals from Kasey Choma and Doherty in the first and second periods, respectively. Wolak's only goal of the night came late in the third after BC built a two-goal lead behind Emma LoPinto's first of two goals, and it took a foul and a clear to spring Kathryn Morrissey, an off-the-board option compared to other shooters, for her 17th goal of the season.
"Each game has a different game plan," said Scales. "Sometimes we're playing straight up on the wall, and sometimes we're sliding, but it definitely changes every game. That's why we emphasize our communication; it's very hard to know what you're doing, but if you have the communication, it becomes 10-times easier. Having that proactive communication before we even get going is huge, and we know what to do before the play is even happening."
"We short of shifted the game plan around our defense," Walker-Weinstein said. "We looked like more of a one-one team, but we'll probably need a combination of both [man-to-man and zone defensive strategies] against Syracuse. The girls have been flexible and adaptive to the game plan, but it'll be a little bit different against a different [team]."
The performance rewrote the story from the one-goal loss that lapsed in the first matchup with Notre Dame, and it sent BC into Sunday's conference championship game as a team rewriting its legacy as a premier attack-based squad. It didn't erase that legacy - the Eagles still average 17 goals per game and feature one of the five best scoring offenses in the nation - but it was a very different look from a postseason team that won last year's championship with a similar type of win over the Irish in the conference semifinals.
That run ended with an 11-9 win over North Carolina and featured the first conference champion to win all three of its games featuring 10 goals or less, and it crowned the first ACC champion to win its title with less than 10 goals allowed in its run since Maryland won two straight games in the six-team conference tournament in 2013. Those years gifted the top two teams an automatic bye to the semifinals, which made last year's championship game unique for the two teams that each allowed 10 goals in its first two matchups.
"These guys have been in these positions before," said Walker-Weinstein. "They have a little bit of an idea what it's going to feel like and that Sunday is going to be hard. But between [games], we're going to do everything we can do to control our fuel, our sleep, our recovery. All of the preparation that we need to do, these guys are fully capable of doing that. It's all about the game plan and the execution, and I like my team in those moments."
The 2024 ACC Women's Lacrosse Championship is set for Sunday, April 28, at 12 p.m. from the American Legion Memorial Stadium in Charlotte, North Carolina. The game can be seen on national television via the ACC Network with streaming options on ESPN's family of Internet and mobile device apps.
Notre Dame possessed one of the few attacks capable of playing head-to-head with BC, and Walker-Weinstein watched the Fighting Irish finish one goal better than her Eagles during their mid-March matchup at Alumni Stadium. The road to the ACC championship game destined to pit BC against either Notre Dame or Syracuse in some capacity, but the fifth overall game against the Fighting Irish over the past two seasons forced her to reassess how to stop the emergent, multi-faceted opponent.
She watched film and reasoned against overanalyzing what she saw, but as the coaches caffeinated their minds into the deep Charlotte night, the light bulb within a mind that clinched both conference and national glory opted for the most straightforward approach. BC, she believed, had the defensive talent to stop Notre Dame, so she manned up the team and instructed them to guard the Fighting Irish with a straightaway, one-on-one alignment.Â
Notre Dame's attack was the sum of its parts, so BC dedicated itself to dismantling each individual piece with a methodical and systematic counterattack. At its best, the unrelenting approach prevented the mighty Fighting Irish from mustering any type of traction, and the Eagles charged their way into the conference championship game with a complete, 9-7 win.
"I think that regardless of the score, the defense has one goal," said goaltender Shea Dolce. "It's always been about giving the offense the ball. We take everything one possession at a time, and we're not really [thinking about] if we have a lead or if it's tied [because] we were really just trying to do our job. [On Friday night], we were just locked in."
Using the one-on-one defense carried inherent risk against Notre Dame because of the Fighting Irish's overall strength in generating its goal-scoring ability. The team that entered Friday night just short of 18 goals per game didn't have a single player in the top-50 of individual scoring in the nation, a fact that stamped home the six different players with 20-plus goals on the season. Five of those players each generated 15-plus assists with the large bulk at or near 20 helpers, but even the more pure numbers of players like Jackie Wolak and Madison Ahearn had a full cloud of other options with teammates like Mary Kelly Doherty and Abby Maichin scoring 20 goals with a 50 percent success rate on their shooting numbers.
The numbers stood in stark contrast to the Duke attack with two 20-goal scorers and four players in double figures. Where Wednesday focused on neutralizing the Blue Devils with a zone-based approach that took the key scorers out of their element, Notre Dame easily sought to metamorphosize into a different team when the first options weren't available in the first half.
"The biggest thing in those moments is what we talked about in the huddle," said senior Sydney Scales. "It's about having a single person communicate about what's controllable. Especially at the end of a game, where you're tired, you have to focus on [communicating] because it connects each of us on the field. We have to make sure we're playing well when we want to be one-on-one. Every time we played well, we were holding the other team, so we needed to keep doing that, regardless of when we were tired or a little bit fatigued [as the game wore on]."
The end result prevented Notre Dame from ever gaining more than its initial 1-0 lead. Ahearn's goal in the first five minutes of the first quarter was her only tally until nine minutes remained in the game, and the ensuing switch to secondary options failed to generate more than the late quarter goals from Kasey Choma and Doherty in the first and second periods, respectively. Wolak's only goal of the night came late in the third after BC built a two-goal lead behind Emma LoPinto's first of two goals, and it took a foul and a clear to spring Kathryn Morrissey, an off-the-board option compared to other shooters, for her 17th goal of the season.
"Each game has a different game plan," said Scales. "Sometimes we're playing straight up on the wall, and sometimes we're sliding, but it definitely changes every game. That's why we emphasize our communication; it's very hard to know what you're doing, but if you have the communication, it becomes 10-times easier. Having that proactive communication before we even get going is huge, and we know what to do before the play is even happening."
"We short of shifted the game plan around our defense," Walker-Weinstein said. "We looked like more of a one-one team, but we'll probably need a combination of both [man-to-man and zone defensive strategies] against Syracuse. The girls have been flexible and adaptive to the game plan, but it'll be a little bit different against a different [team]."
The performance rewrote the story from the one-goal loss that lapsed in the first matchup with Notre Dame, and it sent BC into Sunday's conference championship game as a team rewriting its legacy as a premier attack-based squad. It didn't erase that legacy - the Eagles still average 17 goals per game and feature one of the five best scoring offenses in the nation - but it was a very different look from a postseason team that won last year's championship with a similar type of win over the Irish in the conference semifinals.
That run ended with an 11-9 win over North Carolina and featured the first conference champion to win all three of its games featuring 10 goals or less, and it crowned the first ACC champion to win its title with less than 10 goals allowed in its run since Maryland won two straight games in the six-team conference tournament in 2013. Those years gifted the top two teams an automatic bye to the semifinals, which made last year's championship game unique for the two teams that each allowed 10 goals in its first two matchups.
"These guys have been in these positions before," said Walker-Weinstein. "They have a little bit of an idea what it's going to feel like and that Sunday is going to be hard. But between [games], we're going to do everything we can do to control our fuel, our sleep, our recovery. All of the preparation that we need to do, these guys are fully capable of doing that. It's all about the game plan and the execution, and I like my team in those moments."
The 2024 ACC Women's Lacrosse Championship is set for Sunday, April 28, at 12 p.m. from the American Legion Memorial Stadium in Charlotte, North Carolina. The game can be seen on national television via the ACC Network with streaming options on ESPN's family of Internet and mobile device apps.
Players Mentioned
Football: Head Coach Bill O'Brien Postgame Press Conference (November 29, 2025)
Sunday, November 30
Football: Grayson James Postgame Press Conference (November 29, 2025)
Sunday, November 30
Football: KP Price Postgame Press Conference (November 29, 2025)
Saturday, November 29
Men’s Hockey: Notre Dame Press Conference (James Hagens, Head Coach Greg Brown - Nov. 28, 2025)
Friday, November 28
